emotional structure, the transformational character arc, and developmental edits

Sunday, January 8, 2017

Prologue Structure Part 1

Good Morning and welcome to Prologue Structure for Character
and Plot-driven Stories! I really have this intense urge to do the “who” I am
spiel since I do it all the time, so I will, even though you pretty much know
who I am if you’re here. Hi! My name is Jodi and I’m a dev editor based in the
Greater Seattle area (which means I live as far away from the city center as I
can). I specialize in character-driven narratives of all sorts,
broken things and people who’ve hit the limits of what they can do by
themselves. My current home on the web is over at AWW, so if you’re interested
in checking it out there’s a link over on the sidebar about my current
workshops—that said, hey!!! Welcome. J

This is a really old workshop that I wrote, God knows—about seven
years ago? I still have a soft spot for it, because it’s something a lot of
people don’t really talk about (and I love prologues—epilogues, too. I’m a
sucker for seeing everyone happy, weddings, babies, hot guys potentially
getting ready to spin off book #2, and dangerous villains lurking in the
shadows, you know, stuff like that).

The Pros and Cons of
using a prologue

Many writers don’t like prologues and feel readers don’t like them. They might also
think a prologue isn’t “needed”, which is true, because a prologue isn’t necessary. Unlike a beginning,
middle or end, nobody really “needs” a prologue. It’s not part of your story
skeleton. It’s more like a set of braces; an add-on to something that already
works fine.

Like braces, prologues are all about personal choice. Maybe
you feel your story is crooked and needs a little support, or think it doesn't
look right, or maybe your gut feeling says a prologue simply needs to be there.
Because a good prologue is hard to write, some people have sworn off them and
encourage others to do the same. However, a prologue, regardless of where you
stand on the prologue debate, is a stylistic choice. It’s not right, wrong, or
lazy writing; it’s simply one of many choices you make during the creation
process.

In The Elements of
Style, Strunk says, “Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain
no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason
that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary
parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that
he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word
tell.”

Not that I’m arguing with Strunk, but good writing sings and
dances, it doesn’t plod along like an English textbook. How many times have you
seen a book that totally blew away everything you knew was right and reached the top of the bestseller lists?
Head-hopping, run-on sentences, goofball plot events and purple prose—you can
do anything if you connect with your
reader. Good writing tells a great story.
Whether you have a couple of unnecessary words, want to go purple, blue or
Hemingway, if it works, it works, which is why voice is the hardest thing to
teach.

Voice is how you
interpret craft.

However, before you start thinking I'm a prologue advocate,
I don’t believe everyone should have a prologue. Prologues don’t make weak
writing stronger or a weak story better. If you like and want to use a prologue
it should be an informed choice and work with the story you want to tell.

What readers don’t like are prologues that don’t work.

What a prologue is
and isn’t:

A prologue is not an
info-dump.

If you have a romance between John and Jane, but talk about
how John’s grandma Suzy owned a Victorian, made friends with Jane and left the
house to her which made John upset because he wanted the house to stay in the
family, then you show John getting the news, talking to a lawyer and swearing he’ll get the house back
for his sweet old mum to set up for the story—that’s an info-dump.

A prologue is not
unrelated information that has nothing to do with the story you’re currently
writing.

If John practices kendo, or Jane once saw a ghost—maybe John
is the founder of the local Veteran’s Day parade or is really a hot alien
general, it should only be in your prologue if
it impacts the story, comes up again, or illustrates a point. It’s cool that
John is well-rounded, but keep it pertinent.

A prologue should not
read like the Old Testament, the history of the world or say things like
“Little did she know” or “As she was to find out.”

Unless you’re so good an unrelated sampling of beta readers
and crit partners agrees your prologue is the hottest thing to hit paper since JR
Rowling wrote Harry Potter, toggle back on over-the-top word choices (unless,
of course, your entire story reads the same way).

A prologue should
provide info that would take a huge amount of time to explain or has more
impact when shown.

Remember Jane’s friend, Suzy, the old lady with the house?
What’s the important part of that whole scenario? Is it John’s vow to get the
house back? Or his meeting with the lawyer?

It’s actually Suzy’s death.

If Suzy didn’t die and leave the house to Jane, the story
doesn’t happen. Why did Suzy leave
the house to Jane? Could it be that no one in her family cared enough to talk
to her? Was Jane her only friend? Did Jane love
Suzy?

Showing their connection is important exposition because it
is the basis for one of Jane’s primary motivations. When John shows up, wanting
to buy the house back from Jane—Jane’s love for the woman she considered a
second mother, and anger at Suzy’s family, will provide a major source of
conflict.

Narrowing it down still further, showing Jane in the
Emergency Room, crying at Suzy’s bedside, holding on to Suzy’s hand provides an
emotional hook. There is nothing
stronger than the death of a loved one (although this doesn’t mean the death of
someone the protagonist loves is the only thing that goes in a prologue, lol).

A prologue should be
connected to the story you’re telling.

Not “a” story, or the story of your character’s lives at
some earlier or later time, but this
story.

If Jane’s mom once took her to a Christmas pageant and Jane
fell in love with Santa Claus, which is why Jane collects Santa figurines,
Jane's santa-holic behavior has nothing to do with her making a stand in Suzy’s
house (see that paragraph about unrelated information).

But if Jane’s mother used to beat her and forgot Jane at school
the day of the Christmas pageant, and Suzy was the mean old librarian
who found Jane hiding in the stacks, got her something to eat and turned Jane’s
life around—showing that makes a good prologue.

A prologue, above all—should
be an emotional hook that pulls your reader into chapter one.

If you don’t “feel” it, your reader won’t either. The story
of Suzy’s death, or the beginning of Jane and Suzy’s friendship might feel over
the top, but there’s a vast difference between a dry recitation of story events
and a visceral experience done up close and personal. If you’re throwing a
prologue in there, make it count.

Plot-driven v.
character-driven?

Before we get started, I’d like to spend a little time
exploring the difference between character and plot-driven stories because it
makes a difference in what you’re trying to do, and how to do it. Not that
either way is wrong. Simply that each way needs to be approached differently.

Plot-driven stories are not necessarily bad, and character-driven stories are not necessarily good. Like anything else, what sells
comes and goes in cycles. Sometimes one style does better, sometimes the other
does.

When you call a story plot or character-driven, you’re
simply describing a construction style. In a plot-driven story, events are the
driving force. A good example of this would be when Joan’s sister is kidnapped
in Romancing the Stone and Joan has
to deliver the package her brother-in-law mailed to her before he died, or the murder
of Luke Skywalker’s aunt and uncle in A
New Hope, and Luke’s decision to leave Tatooine.

Joan wouldn’t decide to leave for Cartagena, and Luke
wouldn’t make the decision to leave Tatooine by themselves, but since plot
events—the kidnapping and murders—happened, the characters have no choice
except to react.

Characters are subordinate to the plot, and are moved by the
needs of the plot. Joan needs to get
to Cartagena to save her sister, and Luke needs
to help Leia and redeem his aunt and uncle’s deaths. It’s fast-paced and high
concept. If it were a book, it’d be called a page turner, because each page
flips in a logical chain.

The reader needs to know what happens next. Does Luke save
the Princess? Does Joan trade El Corazon for her sister? Joan doesn’t spend a
lot of time showing her internals, which doesn’t mean she doesn’t have
internals. It’s just that the story focus is on externals.

Good examples of plot
driven movies would be

Rogue One

The DaVinci Code

And Die Hard

Plot driven stories can be described in a quick elevator
pitch.

A good plot-driven story, like Die Hard, can also have many character-driven elements, because the
best plot-driven stories grow out of character in the same way a good
character-driven story has an integrated plot.

Character-driven stories are a little more difficult to
describe because they’re driven by character and sometimes characters do things
that don’t make sense or come out of nowhere unless you think about their
actions as part of a greater whole. In the Indiana Jones movies, Indy rushes around, fighting
bad guys and avoiding snakes. It’s a great adventure. In Witness,
another Harrison Ford movie, he also fights
bad guys. The difference is that it’s a character-driven movie, so when you
remember it, you don’t remember the chases or shootings, you remember Book
waking up in Rachel’s bed, freaking out over his gun and changing over the
course of the movie.

While plot-driven stories can contain a character arc, in a character-driven story the
transformational arc is very pronounced. John Book isn’t the same man at the
end of Witness, while Indy is the
same at both the beginning and end of
Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Character-driven stories run on emotion.

A good example of
character-driven movies would be:

Witness

Casablanca

Zootopia

A character-driven story is more complex emotionally, but might also contain less
plot because people are the plot drivers and plot flows out of them (you know—sucking
up more word count), instead of being imposed on them.

A good rule of thumb is that if you think of the story as a
whole, a story is plot-driven if the largest percentage of word count has to do
with what is going on, versus
following someone like Rick in Casablanca
as he angsts over Ilsa, or Judy Hopps in Zootopia
as she tries to live her dream.

When is a prologue
chapter one?

A prologue is your first chapter if you can take away the label calling it a prologue; re-label it
chapter one and the story flows on without skipping a beat.

There needs to be some kind of focused disconnect between the
prologue and the first chapter (which we'll talk about next time), although that disconnect can’t be totally
random. The prologue and first chapter must make sense together, even if the
prologue is simply a bookend device (creates a resonance with the epilogue).

When prologues work, they work well. When they’re done
badly, it’s usually because the writer wants to explain things he or she doesn’t
think the reader will catch without having it diagrammed ahead of time or
simply has an interesting scene that is way too cool to leave out of the story.

Maybe the prologue explains the war in Heaven, the fall of
Lucifer, and ends with the formation of Hell. Then the first page opens on some
guy walking down the street looking for a cup of coffee. Five pages later we
find out the guy’s name is Starr, he lives in Boston, and someone is killing
prostitutes. It doesn’t connect. It might, if the author wanted to set Lucifer
up as Starr. But simply focusing on events in the prologue doesn’t make the
story a connected whole. “You” might know where the story is going, but you
need to give your reader some clues.

Who is this Starr guy? Is he Lucifer? The prologue talks
about Lucifer, but chapter one is some guy walking down the street looking for
coffee.

If the story is really about an angel who got caught up in
the war, decided to hang out with humans, and now he’s a detective/cop/whatever
and the plot involves human trafficking—the author probably figured the
prologue made sense since it’s what caused Starr to become a cop. He Fell.

Starr’s Fall is backstory but until you also think about the prologue as a focal piece for your story it’s hard to tell if it’s the right
thing to show. Besides being a hook, a prologue should be the right hook.
Characters, like people, have lives that run in a continuum. Stuff happens
before the story and keeps happening afterwards.

The creation of Hell isn’t part of Starr’s story. It’s interesting and was probably fun to write, but
Hell is part of Lucifer’s story and
even if they were friends and fought together, Lucifer and his issues have nothing to do with Starr and his coffee.

Which means in addition to being the “right” hook, a
prologue needs to stay on target.

Next up: Making it work

I have comment moderation on, so don't be surprised if your comments don't show up right away. I get a lot of spammers, so I want to check it out before posting it (plus it makes sure I see it). If you have a prologue and want to talk about it, be aware that I'll probably talk about it on the blog :). Thanks for dropping by!

7 comments:

I just wrote my first ever prologue, and I should have had this to read beforehand. However, I think I hit all your requirements, except perhaps the direct connection between the prologue and the first chapter. But I assume that your guidelines aren't set in stone. Do you think that prologues are more "hooky" in general? That they can be more dramatic and different in tone and voice from the rest of the story?

nah, they're not set in stone. Prologues are part of the kuleshov effect, which is that things in close proximity (like a prologue and first chapter) are somehow related and one will give some sort of "spin" to the other.

looking at your prologue, I'd say that it works because you deliberately echoed word choices at the end of the prologue and used them in your first chapter. I'd suggest pulling a little more of the imagery from the prologue into the first chapter :) but otherwise it's solid. So can they be different from the main body of work? That's a definite yes. But it depends on what you use to bridge the disconnect. :)

"A good rule of thumb is that if you think of the story as a whole, a story is plot-driven if the largest percentage of word count has to do with what is going on." WOW - loved that sentence. Why hasn't anyone made it that simple before!

Melissa? It looks like the site is down. Not sure why and I sent an email to the admin. The links should work when they go back up again :) If they don't, send me an email at jodi henley AT gmail. com and when it goes up I'll make sure to let you know. I look forward to seeing you soon!